Skepticism is what the rational man can't go without. It is his vade mecum, and when three locations which he has been told are moving towards democracy — Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories — can be determined in respective cases hindered, waylaid and usurped by sedition and terrorism, he responds by taking the nearest democratist by the ear to explain just what in hell is happening.
Each of the three situations deserves attention to its circumstances, as well as misperceptions driving criticism. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in his speech to Congress, offers reminders of the imparted stewardship of his country, the obdurate and numerically select natures of Baghdad's enemy, and — by way of his condemnation of Israel's defense against terrorists of Hezbollah — the autonomy already present in Iraqi polity. Lebanon, the site of open and oblique hostilities between Israel, Syria and Iran, exposes the insolubility of Hezbollah's base violence in the liberalism to which a plurality of Lebanese currently aspire.
It is the Palestinian territories' election early in the year, however, that has been adopted as a precedent and portent by skeptics of democratism and its White House exponents. Skeptics argue that the ascension of terrorists shows the folly of democratization. This is wrongheaded, as it confuses transnationalism and its contrived balloting for democratism and its vision of elemental change in societies. Conservatives on the right are especially liable to this indiscrimination.
In February terrorist group Hamas, after years of aggrandizing inside the territories, rose to power through a process President Bush proudly called "democracy." William F. Buckley, Jr. swiftly wrote two thoughtful disapprobations of what he contended bore Hamas triumphal. In the first article he repudiated the inherent values, as purported, of government by consent; in the second he advised geopolitical progressives to know when to except or abstain. Whither democracy? Mr. Buckley equably approaches the question from the perception, indeed the suspicion, that a democratist pursues liberal reformation in statecraft with concupiscence. It was for Happy Days Were Here Again, a 1993 collection of Mr. Buckley's published work, that three articles were bundled in the subchapter "Three Critical Views on Democratic Fetishism."
One point of Mr. Buckley's is inarguable: what goes on in Gaza and the West Bank is not at all conducive to civil and liberal society. Palestinian rule is not and has never been a democracy. It is an abominable simulacrum, a diplomatic construct whose leaders have, since the Oslo Accords, received international monies and absolution in gross inordinacy to their plain nature and conduct. Mr. Buckley shouldn't trace this back to plans of those who advocate liberalization. Whatever the president thought he could call the process that ended up enabling Hamas, this place is the failure not of the democratists' labors but the transnationalists'.
Moral relativity is the basis for everything a transnationalist does — all countries, governments and leaders are coequal — and so it guided Oslo in 1993. One of the world's most decorated terrorists, Yasser Arafat, was offered the resources, the cachet, of an incipient state. Justification for this went along the lines that a wolf will appreciate the difference between a lamb that is being formally introduced to it and one that is being fed to it. A democratist, if anyone had asked his opinion at the time, would have balked at this and demanded a) the marginalization of anyone like Arafat from politics, and b) the martial nullification of those who intend to overbear free expression in both print and poll. This would have made impossible Arafat's handshake with the late Yitzhak Rabin and necessitated concentration, not withdrawal, of Israeli troops — one reason why, on the face of things, democratists are accused of being unrealistic.
So the Palestinian Authority was created. And? A gangland society prevails. The signal difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is that Hamas doesn't bother with a lot of pretense. Children are brought up on poisonous fiction and aspire to Lead Thug, Supporting Thug, Suicide Bomber; and always Jew-Killer. The transnationalists here have had ten more years than the democratists in Iraq, and yet Mesopotamia, with all its troubles, is set to overtake the territories in civil and political liberties.
Here is where conservatives like Mr. Buckley and transnationalists together part ways with democratists. They will consider, conservatives bitterly and transnationalists blithely, an election of thugs unfortunate but incontestable popular affirmation. This is faulty etiology. Given a choice, people do not knowingly subordinate themselves — never has a nation canted into tyranny without directive repression and violence. For those who would reference Adolf Hitler: at their height of electoral manipulation, the Nazis could only entrap 44 percent of the German ballot. Nor are authoritarian parties exercising sovereignty; rather, they are liable to moral estoppel in pais. Like suicide, the idea of a liberal society approving of its own termination is a freakish variable of logic. If citizens wanted to abolish their individual rights, beginning with that to vote, they wouldn't wait for a majority opinion.
The transnationalists' solution is to try again in the same environment and the conservatives' is to leave the wretched thing alone. But even though conservatives may see the intentions behind Oslo to be as notional as the democratists do, their alternative to democratization is little more than tolerance of dictatorships — which puts conservatives back with transnationalists, who believe that men who gain and keep power through force can be trusted. Saladin's politesse at the siege of Kerak in 1183, through which the wedding party of Humphrey of Tolon and Isabella of Jerusalem was left unmolested, is not found in the conduct of modern authoritarians. The challenge to conservatives is exactly how — in concrete terms, not rhetorical legerdemain — the United States is supposed to succeed in defeating, for a start, Islamist terrorism, when the Near Eastern and South Asian countries to be left politically intact incubate and breed rapacious movements as a function of their remaining dictatorial.
From the conservative argument can be drawn nostalgia for the years before the Second World War, when the Third World was as strange as it was remote, all manner of savage men razing distant wildernesses to be emperor of a hill; while the West got on with its workday. That liberty is never to return but post-apocalypse.